By Martha Ross | [email protected] | Bay Area News Group PUBLISHED: June 6, 2018 at 6:59 am | UPDATED: June 6, 2018 at 7:01 am While reports suggest that a crumbling marriage spurred Kate Spade to take her own life, the fashion designer’s older sister said she had suffered debilitating depression for years, possibly due to bipolar disorder. The sister, Reta Brosnahan Saffo, also said in an interview that Spade, 55, had become fixated on the 2014 suicide of Robin Williams. Saffo said her sister was visiting her in Santa Fe, New Mexico, when news broke in August 2014 that the actor and comedian had died by hanging himself in his Tiburon home. “We were freaked out/saddened,” Saffo wrote in an email to the Kansas City Star, the newspaper serving Spade’s hometown of Kansas City, Missouri. “But she kept watching it and watching it over and over. I think the plan was already in motion even as far back as then.” After Williams died, it was learned that he had suffered Lewy body dementia, an aggressive and irreversible brain disorder. Spade appears to have chosen to end her life in the same manner as Williams. She was found dead Tuesday in the bedroom of her Park Avenue apartment. She was found by a housekeeper with a scarf around her neck, according to police. Saffo told the Star that her sister’s suicide “was not unexpected by me,” explaining how her sister long refused her family’s entreaties to get help, fearing that a hospitalization… [Read full story]